Is protein folding a basic problem? People have suggested it is akin to being NP complete.
I’m not qualified to judge on protein folding; but it seems extraordinarily likely that among all of the problems that currently appear too difficult for us, some of them can be solved quickly with better Bayesian processing of the mounds of data we currently have.
The great advances we’ve made, we’ve made by narrowing down the search space of hypothesis in an intuitive (quasi-Bayesian) manner; but certain things, like computer code, contain patterns our intuition isn’t optimized to grok. (That’s why programming languages help so much by letting us apply the verbal intuition we already have; but even so, we lose track of what goes where after only a very few steps and recursions.) That very general block to optimization is why I suspect a better Bayesian could vastly outperform the best current intuitive approaches.
I’m not qualified to judge on protein folding; but it seems extraordinarily likely that among all of the problems that currently appear too difficult for us, some of them can be solved quickly with better Bayesian processing of the mounds of data we currently have.
The great advances we’ve made, we’ve made by narrowing down the search space of hypothesis in an intuitive (quasi-Bayesian) manner; but certain things, like computer code, contain patterns our intuition isn’t optimized to grok. (That’s why programming languages help so much by letting us apply the verbal intuition we already have; but even so, we lose track of what goes where after only a very few steps and recursions.) That very general block to optimization is why I suspect a better Bayesian could vastly outperform the best current intuitive approaches.